Combining some of the best aspects of the BlackBerry Bold and the BlackBerry Curve, the BlackBerry Tour from Verizon Wireless is a sleek, fast smart phone with a comfortable keyboard. This device ($199 after $70 mail-in rebate) doesn't offer Wi-Fi, and it's Web browser isn't as good as the competition, but the Tour's speedy processor, sharp display, and global connectivity make it well worth the investment.
Design
The Tour has a beautiful design that puts the old, boring Curve 8330 and the 8830 World Edition to shame. It has a chic black face, keyboard, and recessed trackball. The Tour also has a dark metal border running around its edge, and a subtle yet unique dark-blue carbon fiber-like design on the back cover. Plus, the 2.4-inch, 480 x 360-pixel display is bright and vivid, even if the high resolution often caused us to squint when viewing Web pages.
Measuring 4.4 x 2.4 x 0.6 inches and weighing 4.6 ounces, the Tour is nearly half an ounce heavier than the original Curve, but it’s still pocket-friendly. On the left side is a voice control toggle button, and on the right you’ll find a full 3.5mm headphone jack, volume controls, a camera quick-launch button, and the phone’s microUSB charging port. The top of the phone has two soft keys for locking and muting the phone, design touches pulled from the Curve 8900 and the Storm.
Keyboard
The backlit QWERTY keyboard features beveled keys separated by frets (like the BlackBerry Bold), but, because the Tour is narrower than the Bold, the layout is somewhat cramped. Despite that small caveat, the Tour still has a better keyboard than most smart phones on the market today.
We typed a 45-word block of text on both the Bold and the Tour to get an idea of how fast we could type on each device. On the Bold, we completed this test in 55 seconds with 3 errors; on the Tour we typed the same snippet in 1:04 seconds with 6 errors.
User Interface
The BlackBerry 4.7 OS interface is plain but intuitive, with six icons on the desktop and more inside the main menu. While phones such as the Palm Pre have introduced new operating systems with enticing card–based user interfaces that make it easy to switch between open apps, RIM hasn’t made any noticeable changes to the Tour’s operating system. It works, but it’s far from fun or exciting. On the other hand, you can multitask on the Tour, something you can’t do on the iPhone. For example, we enjoyed surfing the Web and checking e-mail while streaming music from Slacker in the background.
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